by Adam Gopnik
In a way, the passage from “Snowflake” Bentley to the new snowflake stories is typical of the way our vision of nature has changed over the past century: Bentley, like Harris, and the Romantics generally, believed in the one fixed and telling image. We later moderns believe in truths revealed over time — not what animals or snowflakes or icebergs really are, mystically fixed, but how they have altered to become what they are. Those ice flowers formed on that long-ago German window really are like life, in the end, if only because they are lucky to be here, and at the mercy of the elements, as we all are. The sign at Starbucks should read “Friends Are Like Snowflakes: More Different and Beautiful Each Time You Cross Their Path in Our Common Descent.” For the final truth about snowflakes is that they become more individual as they fall; that, buffeted by wind and time, they are translated, as if by magic, into ever stranger and more complex patterns, until at last they touch earth. Then, like us, they melt.
TWO
RADICAL WINTER
The Season in Space
Few of us remember, if any of us ever knew, that the first great modern horror story, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (as it’s properly titled), of 1818, takes place not in Germany or Bavaria or, for that matter, Hollywood, but in the Canadian Arctic, very near the North Pole.
To be sure, it’s mostly a long flashback set elsewhere, in which Doctor Frankenstein explains how it was he came to make the Monster. But the novel really begins on a ship when, after a preamble, the narrator explains that his ambition in life has always been to go north to explore the Arctic and find the North Pole: “This expedition has been the favourite dream of my early years. I have read with ardour the accounts of the various voyages which have been made in the prospect of arriving at the North Pacific Ocean through the seas which surround the pole.” And it is in the Arctic that he sees the hallucinatory image of Doctor Frankenstein on his sled, in hot (or cold) pursuit of a creature as yet nameless, who is someplace out there on his sled. The flashback takes place as Doctor Frankenstein, after he is brought to the narrator’s ship, relates his terrible tale.
Frankenstein, it turns out, made his monster where he lives, and that’s in Switzerland: the early nineteenth-century abode of tamed winter; neutral winter; safe, domesticated, picturesque winter. It’s almost too neat an image for our purposes. The sleep of Switzerland brings forth monsters; the creature breaks out of Chapter One, the Romantic winter of middle Europe, and heads to what he feels is his true and natural home, and that is right here in Chapter Two, the radical winter of the Far North.
He wants to leave the comfortable Romantic winter paradise because he believes, rather pathetically, that his monstrous traits will at least let him live in comfort and alone in the Arctic, maybe with a wife. And so he says to Frankenstein, his creator, rather prosily (that’s the way Romantic monsters sounded): “My vices are the children of a forced solitude that I abhor; and my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal. I shall feel the affections of a sensitive being, and become linked to the chain of existence and events, from which I am now excluded.” He goes on to say that he hopes to flee to “the everlasting ices of the north, where you will feel the misery of cold and frost, to which I am impassive.”
The image, the idea, is quite straightforward. The Frankenstein story, which, after all, has that subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, is a story about man attempting too much, about man tempted by knowledge to do things that he shouldn’t do, and the natural destination of that kind of story is the North Pole. Frankenstein’s is a Promethean story in every sense: don’t go there, because if you go there you will lose your humanity in your search for knowledge. It’s an allegory of science — and of scientific exploration. Get too crazy in Geneva and you’ll end up chasing a monster to the top of the world. And it’s quite spooky and strange that Mary Shelley makes the climax of her story a sled race between Frankenstein and his Monster towards the Pole, a race that eerily and, with the prescience available only to the deepest kind of poetry and myth, directly anticipates the end of the century and the twin doomed and fatal races for both poles that will take place between Scott and Amundsen, Peary and Cook.
To race towards winter is different from ruminating on it. For the Romantic painters and musicians and poets, winter became a season of seductive charm, deep fascination, and profound meaning as intense and significant as any other season. But in looking through their window on winter we were looking mostly at winter as we experience it when we’re staying in one place — the winter that is a season, bounded by fall and spring on either side, by the knowledge of a gradual decline and by the certainty of an eventual return. I want to look next at a different face of winter. It’s the winter of the Far North and, eventually, the Far South — the winter of the Arctic and the Antarctic, the permanent winter of the globe’s two poles, and the search for them. Radical winter, I’ll call it, because its subject is extreme conditions, and their meaning. If the first window on winter was a winter largely of the eye, recorded in paintings and photographs, showing things seen, this is a winter of electric enterprise, recorded largely in journals and memoirs, registering things suffered.
The music to have in mind is by Harry Somers, the twentieth-century Canadian composer, and it’s called, simply, North Country. It’s meant to evoke the idea of the journey north, the journey towards the poles, the journey towards the extremes. Its biting strings and relentless tempo recall in some way Vivaldi’s “Winter,” that first memorable pre-modern winter theme, but Somers’ music is different in the extremity of its torment and the certainty of its bite. (Although my good Canadian wife said instantly, as I played it for her, “Ah, the CBC on a Sunday afternoon in my childhood, and my mother making dinner!” Music makes many kinds of memories, indoor and out.) Northern winter isn’t radical winter or temporal winter, it is spatial winter — the winter that you travel towards. To tell the tale of winter without the story of the Far North and the twin poles is not merely Hamlet without the prince but War and Peace set in the Bahamas.
For winter is a place as much as a time, a season that comes heaving into sight while we sit. We can, as I’ve said, experience winter temporally, as the ever-returning season, or experience it cyclically, as the product of a series of ice ages — the planet, after all, was once uniformly warm — or we can experience it spatially, as something up there that’s trying to get here. After all, there is always winter far enough north — those everlasting ices — and then every fall that snowbelt begins to broaden, coming farther and farther south and bringing colder snow with it. By November it’s arrived in the lower part of Canada; by December it has arrived in the northern United States; as December bleeds into January it works its way down to the top fringe of the southern United States, even into Texas — and year after year that charge is defeated, and then winter recedes, back to its permanent summer encampment in the North. That’s one thing that winter is: this Far North thing that charges south and then goes back. And so if we want to experience winter in the fullness of its moral challenge — and in all its potential spiritual blessing — we can’t wait for it to happen but have to go out and get it.
And so to find it, we go towards . . . the North! And, for that matter, the South. The search for that spatial winter, the search for the poles, has become an obsessive subject for modern people. It’s the model of all exploration for exploration’s sake, exploration undertaken with a minimum of national advantage, a marginal economic purpose, and a maximal amount of adventure taken for adventure’s sake. Even, if you like, suffering taken on for suffering’s sake. Winter for most of us is a temporary space that comes and goes. The explorers turned winter into a permanent space, a place you went to endure and explore and, just possibly, get rich.
History comes in two flavours, the archival and the available — the past we have to dig out and the past that’s always there in front of us. And the polar past is avai
lable; the big names are known to everybody. Franklin and Peary, Scott and Shackleton — we know of their exploits, in a way that we don’t know the names of many of the men and women who brought us greater comforts. No one knows the name of that blessed nineteenth-century man who invented the steam-heating radiator (Franz San Galli, if you’re making notes), but every schoolboy and schoolgirl knows the names of those who fled it. We all know the names of those who took up arms against the tide of central heating and went north and south in search of the True Cold. They continue to inspire literature, feature films, documentaries, even poetry — in the past twenty years alone, two collections by woman poets have been devoted to the metaphor of Arctic and Antarctic travel — in a way that no other adventure story of early modern times can do. The makers of our comforts, past and present, pass; those who fled them have become immortal so that we can read about them in the comfort that the forgotten ones made.
And this at a time when most other imperial and colonial expeditions have melted from glory into shame. We look now at the exploration of Africa, the search for the source of the Nile, the search for the heart of the Congo, with at best ambivalence and more often simple guilt. But the northern and southern searches still have an aura of significance, an aura of meaning — even, if you like, a halo of glory — that makes them different from all the other great imperial adventures of the nineteenth century. (With, of course, the permanent irony that, like the Sherpas who eventually schlepped Hillary to the top of Everest, the Inuit, the aboriginal people, had been there all along, had seen it all, and could have told them which way to go and how to get there, if they had only stopped to listen.)
“It is eternal winter there,” William Blake once wrote about a place without love, and there in the North it really is eternal winter, though not always untouched by passion. The subject of this chapter is not winter the visitor, to be endured or enjoyed and then overcome, but winter the destination. Winter, if you like, as the woman to be won — at least, the men winning it would have seen it on those terms — the goal to be taken, the well at the end of the world, the pole on top of all else. Winter the prize — though, most often, in the end the most pyrrhic of all possible prizes.
Though the Far North was in many ways a perfect blank to the nineteenth-century explorers, that blank was filled with words before it was ever filled in by first-hand experience. You could read all about what the North Pole was like before anyone went there. When Greek geographers first began considering what might lie at the top of the world, one idea was that the Arctic would not be, as one might expect, a forbidding white blankness but would instead be paradisiacal and welcoming and wonderful. It’s an idea that in the eighteenth century, and even into the early nineteenth century, still holds strong. There’s a partial justification for this: one of the things that whalers and explorers had already noticed in the seventeenth century is simple — the ice flowed south. Ice from the Arctic tended to flow south, which suggested to them that something hot was breaking it up farther north. And they turned that simple observation into the idea that there must be a kind of “open polar sea” up there heated by ocean currents. Perhaps the Pole was not merely warmer than you might expect but was itself a temperate region, a paradise of green that sat on the very top of the world.
And this idea in turn transmuted into the even more extravagant — yet in its time surprisingly credible — notion that the top of the world might be an open well and that the poles were giant caverns that went right through the earth. That idea was eccentric, and hardly accepted by anyone. But the larger idea, part of the common coin of the period and into the beginning of the nineteenth century, was that the poles, particularly the North Pole, were, despite their fearsome moat of ice, themselves paradisiacal. If you could ever break through the citadel, cross the moat of ice that surrounded them, you’d find not just a new colony but a place to luxuriate in, and one where you could in every sense dominate the world — the ultimate rich and warm high ground of the planet.
So Santa’s workshop is not the first projected imagination that showed a happy commune at the top of the world. Some of this was false deduction from that partial evidence of warmer water. But some of it reflects a need to believe that the Far North is vibrant and alluring, along with a need locked deep in our nomadic hearts to believe that the next place we get to will be the good one. Incantation has its power to stir modern people. The “open polar sea” is an idea, but also a phrase to recite again and again, with its beautiful open vowels at the beginning and its long, sibilant endlessness to close (“circumnavigable Arctic Ocean,” the alternative phrase, doesn’t touch it, though it’s the same idea).
Now this idea of a green, much less an open, Pole strikes us as just wrong — crazy speculation — and the search for it as a classic example of throwing good money after bad (or good men after bad voyages). But if you think about it, you’ll see it’s also the kind of unconscious and conscious salesmanship that goes on whenever powerful people are urging you to go someplace you might not normally think of going. Though it is true, for instance, that every planet beyond our own that we’ve encountered so far is airless, sunless, frigid, uninviting to life, still when someone says that beyond the belt of uninhabitable planets there must be another, better belt, with planets like our own that are inhabitable . . . Well, we don’t have to imagine such talk. We hear that kind of talk going on all the time, about the discovery of earth-like planets in the distant galaxies. We don’t often say, That seems improbable. We’ll trust our inductive logic and expect that all the other planets will be as uninhabitable as the ones we know now, as barren as Mars or the moon. We say instead, Oh, that sounds possible! because we want to believe that it’s so. The paradisiacal pole, though it seems a bizarrely counterintuitive idea to us now, was, in the context of exploration of the unknown, a rational notion, and so it became a resilient and robust one.
For the undiscovered country is always either very good or very bad, as the folks in the next valley are usually either elves or cannibals. If in the imagination of Western man at the beginning of the nineteenth century there was this notion of a paradisiacal Pole, there was at the same time a rich and urgent imagination of its direct opposite, what we might think of as that Promethean Pole, Frankenstein’s Pole — the poles as the ultimate testing place of man’s hubris. As Prometheus in Greek myth was punished for stealing fire, we’d be punished for underestimating ice. We see a stark, indelible picture of the Promethean Pole in both of the writers who made the modern horror story, and, indeed, later on in the modern horror film. We’ve seen it already in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the perfect parable of the Promethean Pole. The right setting for a horror story about going too far was the everlasting ice of the Far North.
The same kind of voyage to the Promethean Pole, with the same terrible outcome, also occurs in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, written in the 1830s. Instead of going north, Poe sends his hero in the opposite direction, to the South Pole. I don’t know how many of you recall Arthur Gordon Pym — it’s the longest single story that Edgar Allen Poe wrote — but it’s extremely spooky and effective because it starts off as a more or less realistic, if gruesome, tale about shipwreck and abandonment, then slowly, step by step, turns into a tale about supernatural hallucination. The story is Pym’s imaginary diary, and as we’re reading it entry by entry and as Pym goes on, he finally approaches the South Pole and writes:
March 21. A sullen darkness now hovered above us — but from out the milky depths of the ocean luminous glare arose, and stole up along the bulwarks of the boat. We were nearly overwhelmed by the white ashy shower which settled upon us and upon the canoe, but melted into the water as it fell. The summit of the cataract was utterly lost in the dimness and the distance. Yet we were evidently approaching it with a hideous velocity. At intervals there were visible in it wide, yawning, but momentary rents, and from out these rents, within which was a chao
s of flitting and indistinct images, there came rushing and mighty, but soundless winds, tearing up the enkindled ocean in their course.
March 22. The darkness had materially increased, relieved only by the glare of the water thrown back from the white curtain and before us . . . And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.
And boom! — at that point the Pym “diary” ends, and then there is pseudo-objective speculation of what it means. So there you see, in the minds of the two great makers of modern horror, the notion that at either extreme, actually getting to those poles is a very bad idea. That what awaits you is monstrous self-knowledge at one pole or the ultimate sinister spectre of snow at the other. Counterbalancing the idea that to go all the way north or south is to get to a lost Eden is the idea that to go all the way north, or south, is to tempt fate. And fate, the Snow Queen herself, has a way of paying back those who tempt her.
It’s not just the myths of the poles, paradisiacal or Promethean, that tell us something. It’s that the myths were so potent, the words carried so far. For, though as a proportion of the population, the number who went towards the poles was essentially zero and, viewed in the broad commerce of the time, what they brought back was essentially nothing, those who cared were essentially everyone. In that way the polar journeys were word-bound literary journeys — fuelled by fiction, supported by stories, and ending in memoirs; the travellers wrote, got read, and caused others to write, and then they went to write again. These were expeditions in which words went in one end, experience passed through the middle, and words came out the other — a kind of vast digestive system of bitter cold and better writing.
